The ability to turn off sidebar ads, sponsored links, both, or neither

Friends with Benefits™ — notes you can add to your list of friends to help you keep track of them all

Access to a super-secret members-only community that may or may not exist

A thank-you note

Today we have some new things to add to that list. But first…

You get a sort! And you get a sort! Everybody gets a sort!

Remember that feature, where only reddit gold accounts were able to sort their userpages? Now everyone can do it. Special thanks to our subscribers for serving as guinea pigs, and for paying for the machine time that makes it all possible. Here are a couple of ways we’d like to say thanks:

Moar comments

More reddit servers are devoted to generating comments pages than any other task. That’s why you only get 500 comments when you first load the page. However, if you sign up for gold, you can now see twice as many without having to hunt for “load more comments” links. As usual, the special features are indicated by golden blingblong:

We can do this because, by the time there are enough gold accounts to have a noticeable impact on our comments servers, the subscription funds will have paid for another cluster.

Use Your Allusion

When there’s a special logo on the front page, it’s not always clear what it’s alluding to. So now we’re going to add some titletext — just hover your mouse over the logo and you’ll get an explanation.

We expect to roll this out to everyone soon, but for now it’s going to be a gold-only feature. Still, it’s not like non-gold users are going to have any trouble at all figuring out this week’s logos. >;)

Redundancy and duplication and redundancy

One of our database machines has been flaking out over the past week (including this morning). In the past, we’d just have to learn to live with it — timing the flakes, planning around them, working to lessen their size and severity, pouring milk on them… anyway, now, we can solve these problems properly; in this case, by adding a backup database machine that can take over when the main one isn’t available. While there may be some initial issues while we bring it up to speed, we should have it thoroughly debugged by the end of the week. And, of course, everyone will benefit from the new infrastructure, gold and otherwise.

If you’d like to try out the new features, support reddit, and help prove to the world that this website has a bright future, you can sign up for reddit gold here.